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7:32 PM, Monday January 4th 2021

Your organic forms are definitely moving in the right direction, and will continue to improve with practice.

While there are issues I will not address until you are finished your full revisions, I will point out a few things to keep in mind as you complete the other three:

  • Draw bigger. There's loads of room all around your drawing that could have been employed. Purposely giving a drawing less room than it requires is a common cause for stiffer linework (since it becomes harder to engage our whole arm while drawing), and also it severely limits your ability to think through spatial problems. Both of these factors result in clumsier linework, and drawing bigger will help resolve this.

  • Don't cut off forms when they're overlapped by another. Draw each and every form in its entirety - so for example, you tend to cut off forms where they connect to the body. Let them interpenetrate, then use a contour line to help define where they intersect.

  • You're using line weight in ways it really shouldn't be used. Line weight exists only to very subtly add variation to the thickness of a line (not big heavy changes, just slight shifts) to help clarify how one form overlaps another. It should not be added to the entire length of a line, just to a small localized area. Furthermore, it should not be added by chicken-scratching as you trace over an existing line. It should be added using the ghosting method. All things considered, I think you should leave line weight out entirely for now, just to focus on a more limited number of problems at once.

  • Similarly to the previous point, filled areas of solid black should be reserved only for cast shadows. Don't confuse them with line weight (line weight runs along the silhouette of existing forms, cast shadows are projected from one form onto another surface, meaning you have to be keenly aware of the relationship between the two forms. If you see something has a black 'local colour' (the colour of the surface/material itself, like in the case of the shrimp's eye), do not fill it in. Treat everything as though it is made with the same flat white material.

  • Keep working on adhering to the sausage method when constructing legs - stick to simple sausage structures, and reinforce the joint between them with a contour line. Drawing bigger will help with this as well.

Next Steps:

Continue with your revisions, and do not submit more work until the requested pages are completely finished.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:34 AM, Wednesday January 6th 2021

Alright heres the full revision.

https://imgur.com/a/qw7AWmv

Apparently I lost count at some point and drew one to many, oh well. Also thanks for taking the time to reply to my partial submission.

3:01 AM, Friday January 8th 2021

There's definitely progress here, but there are a number of key issues that are still present. I've drawn directly on a couple of your pages, and also done a full demonstration to demonstrate the lengthy, patient process behind construction when applied correctly.

First, let's look at your shrimp construction:

  • You've visibly drawn some of your marks to be faint and light, creating the impression of an underdrawing, then others to be very dark, like a clean-up pass. This is not an approach that should be used in this course.

  • While this is definitely bigger than your first drawing, there's definitely still room to take advantage of. Drawing smaller sausages is particularly challenging - this is one of the areas where drawing as big as possible helps. You have a tendency not to draw properly "simple" sausages, and that is likely in part due to you not drawing those marks from your shoulder, instead relying on your wrist which can introduce more sudden changes in trajectory.

  • You've got some chicken scratching on the claws.

  • In general, a lot of your "base" forms (those that are drawn without any underlying supports) are more complex than they ought to be, causing them to read as flat. That's one of the reasons we stress the importance of simple sausages, as shown in this diagram.

  • Overall there are a lot of signs that you're making certain concessions in order to keep your drawing cleaner in certain areas, aiming for a nice picture in the end. The underdrawing/clean-up pass elements lean into that, as do skipping steps and jumping into more complex forms.

Next, this lobster. This one has definitely improved a great deal, although there are still issues worth noting:

  • Your marks here are definitely more confident, leading to more solidity. One thing that would help a great deal is to put more thought into how the segmentation along the abdomen actually wraps around that form. Here they appear to be cutting across it straight, rather than curving around it.

  • Your thorax/head section is too complex. Start with a ball form.

  • Your sausage forms continue to be inconsistent. Some are more ellipses than sausages (note that we only "draw through" ellipses, going around them two full times before lifting the pen because this helps us create elliptical marks - if you do this for a sausage, you're going to end up making it more elliptical). You tend to draw a lot of ellipses instead of sausages in your crab as well.

Here is a full breakdown of how I approached drawing a lobster. This takes time. Looking at your drawings, I don't get the impression that you're putting nearly as much time into the drawing process as you could. That isn't abnormal - students often start out with this impression that they're expected to complete things at a particular speed, that they have to finish a drawing within one session, that they can't come back to it later, and so on. That is all untrue. The only expectation and requirement is that you put as much time as you need to execute each and every mark to the best of your current ability, and you are currently falling far short of that.

You are showing improvement, but you have much room to grow, and so I'd like you to try the same set of revisions I assigned previously over again, taking what I've mentioned here into consideration.

Next Steps:

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves (these are getting better, but it doesn't hurt to get more practice drawing sausages and contour lines with care)

  • 4 pages of insect constructions

And of course, no partial submissions. Each critique takes an enormous amount of time, and the onus is on you to put the work in first.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:22 AM, Tuesday January 12th 2021

Ok, here they are.

First crayfish:

Decided take some time to practice drawing the abdomen then redrew it on a separate page

I intentionally didn't wrap the "armor" around the bottom of the abdomen because that's how it appears in the reference image I used. is this fine or should i have wrapped it around anyway?

Hermit crabs:

I caught myself rushing through the first one so I set it aside and really tried to slow down on the next one.

The second hermit crab took me a lot less time to draw than these usually take, Im hoping this is just because its simpler to draw but please let me know what you think.

Second crayfish:

I still have a hard time with drawing forms accurately, they often come out as different sizes or shapes than I intended. Iv been improving on this slowly as I draw more but for some reason I was really struggling with it on this one.

Ghost crab:

I feel like there was more I should have added to this one but Im not sure what.

Other notes:

Iv had a lot of free time the past few days and have been doing a lot of drawing. Something Iv noticed is how much worse I am at making scratchy lines while drawing these lessons, its not as bad when Im just drawing for fun. I assume this is because Im more relaxed when drawing for fun.

Also wanted to say thanks for being patient with me during this lesson and not just pushing me through to the next one when Im not ready for it. I really appreciate it.

4:23 AM, Tuesday January 12th 2021
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